July 15, 2012

Research In Motion Insists Developers Are Not Abandoning Blackberry

Research In Motion (RIM) is denying reports that developers are abandoning the Blackberry because of the company's recent financial struggles and the platform's declining market share.

John Paczkowski of All Things D was among those who reported on Friday that developers had become "disillusioned" with multiple delays to the BlackBerry 10 operating system, as well as RIM's struggles against the competition in the US. Many of them, Paczkowski wrote, "are throwing up their hands and turning away from the platform."

Data from a recent Baird Equity Research developer survey would seem to support those claims. The firm surveyed a sample of 200 developers and discovered that the overall outlook regarding the Blackberry 10 OS was considerably less positive in the second quarter (3.8 on a 10-point scale) than it was during the previous quarter (4.6).

Furthermore, according to Paczkowski, the study found that nearly one-third (31%) of all BlackBerry 10 developers polled reported that they had shifted some of their work away from BlackBerry 10 -- a decrease of 3% from the previous quarter. On the surface, that might sound like a positive thing, but Baird officials said that the numbers suggest that "many developers who planned to jump ship have already made the move, leaving a BlackBerry developer base that is smaller but increasingly loyal."

Alec Sauders, the chief of RIM's developer program, said that he was "pretty shocked" by Baird's claims.

"I was shocked because the numbers in the report do not gel with what we're seeing in the real world. The report contradicts much of what we are seeing and hearing in our developer community," Sauders said, according to InformationWeek's Eric Zeman. "We have already spoken to almost 5,000 developers and the feedback has been phenomenal."

"The other thing I hear consistently is that RIM simply treats developers better than anyone else in the mobile industry," he added, as noted in a separate report by PCMag's Chloe Albanesius. The developers he had spoken to conveyed to him that they were "amazed at how easy it is to work with the BlackBerry 10 tools," and he added that new developers would be "impressed by the open nature of our platform and our commitment" to them.

RIM recently delayed the release of the BlackBerry 10 OS until the first quarter of 2013.

In related news, late Friday evening, the Canadian telecommunication and wireless equipment manufacturer was ordered by a California jury to pay more than $147 million in damages for infringing upon a patent governing a remote management of wireless devices, Dan Levine of Reuters reported.

The ruling, handed down in a San Francisco federal court, stated that RIM must pay Mformation Technologies Inc., a royalty of $8 for every BlackBerry device connected to the company's enterprise server software in the US -- a sum of $147.2 million, according to attorneys for the plaintiff. Mformation had originally filed the lawsuit in 2008, the jury found in their favor after four days of deliberation, Levine said.

RIM has denied any wrongdoing in the case and insists that the patents were not valid, according to AFP reports. The company said that it will await the judge in the trial to decide "certain legal issues" that could have an impact on the verdict before determining whether or not to appeal.